Meet Luke Frees

Today we’d like to introduce you to Luke Frees.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I grew up in a suburb of Chicago and started playing music when I was four, after watching an Elton John live in Madison Square Garden concert on TV. For a while, I just learned piano, but then I started singing and playing guitar too. That led to me writing my own songs and playing them in bands all throughout middle school and high school.

I then went to Berklee College of Music in Boston and played in a band called The Cotones there. We made a name for ourselves in the Allston house show circuit and eventually released one full-length album called Imaginary Friends. While I was in Boston, I also wrote and produced an EP called After The Rain in 2017 and a full-length album called The Lost Weekend in 2019. After graduating, I moved out to Brookline and wrote and produced my second album, called Some Easy Blood, which came out in October of 2020. This album was recorded guerilla-style in a home studio I’d put together with my roommates. We pooled all our resources and gear together and everyone pitched into work on the project. All of these albums can be found on Spotify, Apple Music, or pretty much any other streaming service.

I left Boston in early 2020 after The Cotones disbanded, and eventually I found myself in L.A., where I started working on a third solo record. This album is going to be called Point Of You and is set for release in the fall of 2021.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
I’m incredibly fortunate to have the support of my family and friends, so my ride has been smoother than a lot of peoples’, but I still find it hard to keep moving sometimes. The pandemic, for example, closed down the live music scene and so many local venues and tiny hole-in-the-wall bars that used to have bands play have closed permanently. That being said, I’ve always believed in music as therapy and I always get a huge wave of release when I write music, so I channel a lot of these heavy emotions into the songs I write. Maybe that’s why I write so many bummer songs…

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m a songwriter and producer, and I play guitar, piano, and I sing. I’ve released two full-length albums and one EP on my own and one full-length album with my old band. I think one of the things that set me apart from other people is my work ethic. When I was at school in Boston, for every songwriting class we had, we had to write one song for it every week. So there were some semesters where I might’ve been taking three songwriting classes and I’d have to write three songs every week. This has helped me be less judgmental of my creative work, which allows me to write at a furiously fast pace, look at the songs objectively, and put out the best ones. I’m a huge admirer of artists like Prince and Bob Dylan, who would write ten times as many songs as what would eventually be released.

Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Risk taking is essential in any aspect of the arts. If you aren’t saying something that scares you a little in your songs or producing things that make you feel like your feet aren’t quite touching the bottom, you’re not trying hard enough. There are too many musicians in the world. We don’t need any more than half-ass the job. Another artist I look up to is David Bowie, and what I like most about him was his fearlessness in doing exactly that. He was always pushing the envelope a little further than people were comfortable with, and in doing that, he made some music nobody else could’ve dreamt of.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: www.lukefrees.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brainfrees/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Luke-Frees-Music-717630075034660
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH2BNWaXAN-hpuAlpqMUN1g
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/luke-frees